I plan on doing magic. Let's take the regeant-less mana missile for example. At level 0 it does about 12 damage. At level 50 I think Brutal was saying it does around 14 damage. Someone posted on the forums today that at level 99 it does 26 damage. At level 100 (it drops back down to 99 after you shoot it once) it does 36 damage.

To level from 99 to 1000 takes 1500 casts of mana missile, each one taking 3 seconds. You can cast 30 before your mana pool runs out. You must rest for 2:30 or so before your mana pool completely regenerates. So 30x3 is 90 seconds, so 1:30 to cast your pool away. 2:30 to rest, so to shoot it 30 times takes in total 4 minutes. This means in one hour you shot it about 450 times. So it takes about 3-4 hours to go from level 99 to 100. This is if you're just running a highly efficient macro while afk, shooting mana missiles into the air. You're literally not wasting any time between casts like this.

Now what about getting to 99, or 98, or 97, etc. It might not take 1500 casts, but it might be 1490, 1480, or whatever. This wouldn't be so bad if missile damage weren't a step function. Rather than damage be represented by a smooth curve (12 damage at 0, 12.2 at 1, 12.4 at 2, etc.) it does 12 until level 25, at which point it does 14, then maybe 18 or so at 75, and then 26 at 99, 36 at 100. So unless you've literally hit 99, the spell is useless in PvP since you're doing less damage than a sword-user with good equipment and 50 or so skill.

I could still see why you'd be against macroing, but then check this: If you level up the "fair" way, and just go off killing goblins or whatever to level, then you'll only be casting maybe 10 spells, then waiting for the goblin to respawn. You're wasting a huge amount of time, and you're limited to level as long as you're at the computer. Macroing you could level 24/7 if the servers never crash (and I've heard you can get scripts going on to connect you to the servers as soon as they're online.)

See the problem now? Leveling magic at least, just isn't viable without macros. And that's just mana missle. To get greater magic you need 50 lesser magic (which levels along with mana missile.) Then to get elemental magic (earth, fire, water, air, etc.) you need I think 50 greater magic. That's all fine and dandy, but to level greater and elemental you _need_ reagents to cast your spells. These reagents drop off stuff like fishing, mining, herb gathering, etc. It takes 10 seconds to do one gathering cycle, and you have about a 30% fail rate, and then you have upon success maybe a 25% if not less chance at getting a reagent. So if it takes 1500 mana missiles to level up when you get to the 90s, how much time are you going to need to invest into harvesting to get the reagents just to level up your "real" pvp spells such as fireball or whatever to the point where they're useful? And then how much of your day will have to be spent gathering just so you can go cast those spells at a pvp siege for more than 30 seconds?

So do you want to spend the maybe 3 hours a day you have online whacking at a rock all day to get reagents for a month, so that then you can spend those 3 hours whacking at goblins with your mid-level spells for a week, then rinse and repeat until you have 50 greater magic so you can then do the same with a fireball or something to begin to enjoy the game? When will you be ready for PvP? After a year? Then you have to leave that progress behind to move to a north american server?

F that. I plan on macroing.

BoS Archon
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